


ad infinitum

by crustybagelbites



Series: Dream Journal [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Groundhog Day, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 06:27:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17678201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crustybagelbites/pseuds/crustybagelbites
Summary: I dreamt of a man whose soul wouldn't rest.





	ad infinitum

I dreamt about a man whose soul wouldn't rest. His name escapes me. This was a young, tall, lanky man of Arab descent. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and long spindly fingers. His face was kind.

The dream starts off with a glimpse into his life. The man lives modestly, working hard to support his family. He has a wife and two children, two beautiful little girls. He’s happy and is a loving and doting father.

He soon finds out that the world is ending. The man watches the news and hears about a solar flare building up that is powerful enough to reach the Earth and destroy it. He only has a few hours left with his family. The man, his wife, and his two kids are killed. Everyone is dead. The world as we know it is soon destroyed.

 

* * *

 

Everything goes _white._

 

* * *

 

The man opens his eyes and is surrounded by white. He feels weightless, and for a moment is filled with joy as he sees his family again. His wife and two young daughters began walking towards an entrance in the distance. It is a huge gate, and the opening is glowing brightly, like that of a portal. It looks ethereal. The man becomes scared as he doesn’t know what will happen if he enters it, but he nervously steps inside of it along with his wife and kids.

 

* * *

 

He is surrounded by _white_ once more.

 

* * *

 

The man wakes up feeling odd because he was under the impression that he was supposed to be in the afterlife, heaven, or somewhere else. The world was destroyed so why is he still on Earth?

After surveying his surroundings he sees that he’s living in some sort of cave, and has been for some time. There's a fire close by and a few soft beds made out of animal pelts. The man also sees that he’s wearing clothing made out of animal hide and doesn’t see any sign of civilization outside of the cave entrance. It’s just wilderness for miles and miles ahead.

The man hears some rustling where his bed is and goes to investigate. Two infant children are laying in the bed and are squirming around. Immediately overcome with parental instincts, the man rushes to the two babies and lays next to them, watching them protectively. Barricading the entrance, the man sleeps fitfully, fearful of the plethora of noises reverberating throughout the cave, the sounds of wild animals stalking about and hollering in the wilderness outside.

The morning comes and while the man is out hunting for food, he is shot through the chest from behind by another hunters spear. The hunter mistook him for an animal and left the man to die. Laying motionless on the ground, the man watched the blood slowly trickle down the length of the wooden spear and onto the grass. He finds it increasingly difficult to breathe. He thought of his two daughters back in the cave and how they would surely starve to death without him. He notices his blood is pooling around his body and is slowly seeping into the soil. His eyes begin to sting as they swelled with tears. Blood seeps from his mouth. The man is dead after a few searing and agonizing minutes.

 

* * *

 

 

Everything goes **black.** It’s a very long time before he wakes up again.

 

 

* * *

 

The man finally wakes up, but this time he finds himself surrounded by darkness. He can see the moon lit faintly up in the sky, and notices that he’s been laying in the middle of a dirt road. In the far distance he can see lights from a few houses which were widely spread apart, but other than that, there is nothing but crops and vegetation for miles around.

The loud rumble of a truck can be heard spitting and coughing its way down the road, and he’s momentarily blinded by the headlights when it stops in front of him.

Everything starts to become hazy as the man tries to get up, and he falls unconscious, lulled into the darkness by the concerned and muffled voices of a woman calling out to him.

 

He wakes once more in an unfamiliar room, comfortably tucked into a twin sized bed, with his feet poking out of the blankets due to his height. Afternoon daylight softly caresses his face beaming from the window on the wall behind him and he realizes he is completely naked. Flustered, he surveys his surroundings and finds that to his right there is clothing laying out for him on a chair, and some water and food sitting on the nightstand closest to him. He gets up slowly, his head pounding and body weak from dehydration and malnutrition. The clothes don’t fit quite right, as he’s a fairly tall and gangling man, but they get the job done at keeping him warm and out of the nude. He looks himself over in a cheval floor mirror and sees that his skin is covered in insect bites and dried dirt, and he makes a mental note to bathe as soon as possible.

The food is also pretty cold, but the loud and sharp growling from his stomach forces him to ignore it and clean the plate. He downs the water in a single chug and exits the room.

He can hear voices somewhere down the hallway, his memory recalling that of a woman helping him the night before. He made his way to what he believes to be the living room, and looks around curiously. There are family photos littering every inch of the walls around him. The living room is a warm and cozy one, emitting a pleasant aura. There is a fireplace on the main wall with a fire smoldering. The house is obviously lived in, and the man can see books and magazines in shelves and on the coffee table, and a couple of Barbie dolls kicked beside the couch. There's a worn black bible sitting on the armrest of a recliner, and a woman's slippers resting next to the chair. He walks closer to the mantel of the fireplace to look at the photos and finds he doesn’t recognize any of the faces he sees.  He wonders where in the world he might be located, and concludes he may be somewhere in the American south or Midwest. He also starts to feel a like an intruder, realizing he’s a stranger in someone else’s house, snooping around, eating their food, and wearing their clothes.

Right as he had that thought, he jumps two feet in the air as he finally notices the young girl standing next to him.

“I’ve never seen you here before,” she proclaims loudly, inching closer to him, finger pointed at his face, staring up at him with enormous blue eyes.

He notices the little girl matched the one he saw in the small framed photo above the fireplace mantel he viewed a few minutes ago. She looked even younger then, though. This girl appeared to be about 11 or 12 years old. She had long tangled blonde hair, and a squishy face. Her eyebrows were wild and had freckles sprinkled all about her face. She had dirt caked under her fingernails, and long eyelashes. She was missing a few of her front teeth, giving her a bit of a lisp.

The man realizes he hadn’t spoken for quite some time as he croaks out a raspy, “Hello.”

A middle aged woman enters the room moments later wearing an apron, with her shirt buttoned down and the sleeves rolled up. Her eyes are just as blue and just as bright as the little girl, and her hair is a dirty blonde, pulled up into a bun, with a few grey hairs strewn about. She had a wide grin, and showed gentle signs of age, crows feet pulling on the corners of her eyes. Her skin looked leathery and worn from the sun, and the man concludes that she must be some sort of farmer. She smelled like apple pie and her smile was warm and inviting.

“Yer finally awake. I was wonderin’ when you’d get outta bed. You were knocked out fer a good 20 hours er so. Slept through the whole damn day,” the woman chuckled as she looked the man over. “You look good in them clothes. They belonged to my son once.”

The man smiled at her. She seemed genuine.

“Didja eat that crap I left ya? Shit was probly colder’n hell. I can fix ya up summore if y’want. Just came back from the kitchen to check on ya.” She seemed pretty concerned as she walked up closer to him, resting her hand on the man's forehead and neck to check his temperature.

The man laughed and lifted his hands up in defense, to protect himself from her mothering, fondly entertaining the thought that the woman looked old enough to be his own mother. “It’s okay, really! There’s no need to be so concerned. I’m quite well actually, thank you. Thanks as well for the food. It was cold but it would’ve been extremely rude not to eat it.”

The woman laughed both heartily and loudly at that. "Yer sure a polite one. I like ya."

She later showed the man around, letting him know where he could find bathrooms and food if he got hungry. She also tried to ask him during supper what his name was and the man tells her he couldn’t answer it. Not that he didn’t want to, but because he had a serious case of amnesia. Still concerned, she tried to ask if he remembered anything about how he got on the road all naked and stuff but he tells her he doesn’t remember.

The woman is understanding and lets him know he can stay as long as he likes, as long as he helps clean and work. The man is grateful.

The little girl stays as curious as ever and questions him at every chance she gets, and the man dodges most of those questions by asking her questions of his own. It becomes a sort of game they start to play. He starts to grow fond of her.

Over the course of the week he starts to remember. He remembers how he got there on the road. And he remembers that this isn’t his first life.

One day he finds himself at the mercy of the farmer’s daughter. The little girl had been pestering him for days trying to learn more about him. She’s just so dang interested she says. He tells her to watch her language. She says okay and my bad.

He notices he had started to grow very attached to her and her mother, since every loop caused him to long for a sense of family and belonging. Every cycle. Life. Death. Rebirth.

 

It’s been eating the man up for days, too. He wanted to tell somebody. Anybody.

 

He sits down with the girl later that day and tells her he remembered some things. She says she’s all ears.

“Alright. I’m going to tell you this, but please know it’s gonna be… Super weird. Maybe even fake.” The man runs his fingers anxiously through his thick curly black hair.

“That’s like, totally fine! Just tell me!” The girl was pretty much vibrating at this point, her tweenage energy building up to this exact moment.

“Have you seen the movie Groundhog Day?”

“Yeah, once maybe, my mom watches old movies with me sometimes.”

“Okay well, I think I've been living through something like that.”

 

The man takes a deep breath, and prepares himself for the first time he’s told anyone about his situation.

 

“I think I might be living through a Groundhog Day, but instead of a day repeating, it’s my whole life. I’m born, I live through life, and I die. It always ends when I die. The scenario changes every time, as well. I’ve had so many lives it's... unbelievable. I can speak more than 10 languages. I was born once in a Turkish family. I remember living in Japan in one life. I’ve had so many names in so many lifetimes.”

The girl is bewildered, but she doesn’t believe him until she asks him to speak the languages he claims to know. When he shows he's absolutely fluent in all of them, the girl starts to trust him and his story completely.

“Most of all, I miss my wife and my two children. Some lives I live are cruel and I never find them. Some lives I find maybe my wife or my two little girls, but they never remembered our first life, where we watched our world die. They thought I was crazy when I tried to tell them.” The man rests his head on his knees and glares daggers into the floor.

“I think maybe this is Hell.” The mans face fell. “I’m so tired. I just want this to be over. I want to see my family again. I want to be at peace.”

The girl tried her best to comfort him, patting at his shoulder childishly. Attempting to reassure him, she mutters a soft, “You seem like a good person. It doesn’t make sense for you to be punished. Maybe this is the last loop.” Those huge blue eyes look up at him. He can’t help but think of his own two daughters looking at him like that, and he wipes a tear from his eye.

“Maybe,” he starts, “maybe if I find them and make them remember our first life the cycle will be broken!” The man is hopeful for a second, before becoming pessimistic once more. “-But they could be anywhere in the world! It could take a lifetime just to find them, if I can.”

The girl grins widely, proudly showcasing all of her crooked and missing teeth, “Guess we better start looking now, huh?”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I rushed to write this as I woke up this morning so I wouldn't forget this.


End file.
